All this I was told, in time, by Poracious Luv, who had used all the resources of the Alliance to get a clearer picture of its agent upon Dinadh.
While in his early twenties, Thosby had experienced the biography of an almost legendary diplomat-cum-secret-agent, and this had convinced Thosby that his true talent lay in foreign service. He thereupon invented the role of Sagacious Applicant, performing it so well that the Bureau of Information Services actually awarded him a minor clerical position, which he filled with his customary distracted inefficiency. His supervisors, finding him too ineffectual to retain but too amiable to dismiss, shifted him to another department, whence he was shifted to others yet as successive executives moved him gently along. Thosby misinterpreted their efforts as he did most things. He believed he was being groomed for A Really Important Position, so he flitted from job to job with an air of intent incomprehension, waiting for his true talents to be applied.
Thosby reached the acme of incompetence in the Division of Minor Planets, a department whose charge it was to recruit unencumbered persons to serve as factotums and general mumbleglums on small and unimportant worlds—places like Far Barbary or Finagle-Chump or Dinadh. No one objected when Thosby was sent to Dinadh as covert flunky in charge of routing intelligence from Hermes Sector. The personnel officer who made the assignment knew, quite rightly, that any idiot could route intelligence!
Thosby Anent, however, was not just any idiot. He was an idiot convinced he was being moved into An Important Place! Prior to his arrival on Dinadh, he spent a great deal of time choosing the roles he would play there—the roles, that is, in addition to the one he had been assigned—coming up with two that were no more inappropriate than all his other roles had been. He chose, as primary persona, the role of Master Spy. For this he had designed and rehearsed a conspiratorial manner and a repertoire of winks and nods of great significance. As a “cover” for Master Spy, he adopted the persona of Codger. This required him to smoke a tobacco pipe, wear an eccentric hat, and adopt a manner of gruff but kindly bemusement along with a spraddled way of walking, as though slightly crippled in the knees. In order to avoid “giving anything away,” Master Spy was laconic while Codger was obfuscatory, apt to take off in dizzying locutory flights, which left his listeners not only lost but remote from any point of reference.
Between the mystifications of Master Spy and the divarications of Codger, Dinadh-Alliance communication soon dwindled to a muddy trickle. People back at Prime learned to send Thosby’s infrequent reports directly into the files, not even feeding them through content analyzers that would have scanned for key concepts, such as lost contact or disappearance.
Thosby took comfort in the lack of feedback. He felt continued silence from Prime was an expression of confidence in him and his work. Meantime, after one or two feeble attempts at supervision, line functionaries at Prime gave up on Thosby and turned to alternate sources of information: agents for other organizations, rumor mongers who were paid for knowing things, people with relatives or friends on settled worlds in Hermes Sector. It was through these that Prime had learned of the Ularian incursions, almost as promptly as Thosby could have informed them.
One young administrator, who was still naive enough to believe that efficiency was a Good Thing, unearthed Thosby’s reports, and after laboriously plodding through one or two, recommended that Thosby be replaced. The recommendation, however, languished on the desk of the aide to the deputy assistant to the subassistant secretary for personnel matters. Everyone was now in a panic about Ularians and much too busy to do anything at all about Dinadh.
All of which, so Poracious Luv told me, explains how the Intelligence Division at Prime, purely on the basis of contiguity and without questioning competence, assigned Thosby Anent the responsibility of monitoring the highly secret work of the Perdur Alas shadow team.
“For want of a nail,” the Procurator would say to me, Saluez, as he reviewed this entire matter, with many a shake of the head and furrowing of the brow. “For want of a nail, the horse was lost … ” (Our animals on Dinadh do not have nails, so I had to ask Lutha what he meant.)